Media Rights Management

Part of the worlds-biggest-software-project initiative.

An AI-native, vertical-agnostic platform for content licensing, rights tracking, and royalty calculation across music, film, publishing, games, and sports.

Media Rights Management is an open-source rights and royalties platform for content owners, publishers, distributors, and licensees. It targets the gap between spreadsheets and enterprise incumbents, giving mid-market content companies a single system to track rights grants across territories, formats, platforms, and time windows, and to compute royalties from reported sales data.

Why Media Rights Management?

Incumbents like Rightsline and Klopotek STREAM are enterprise-grade but carry opaque pricing and long, complex implementations that put them out of reach for mid-market teams.
Most existing tools specialise in a single vertical: Mymediabox in consumer-products licensing, FilmTrack in film/TV, knk and Crealo in publishing, Curve and Reprtoir in music. Companies operating across verticals are forced to stitch multiple systems together.
Mid-tier content companies are routinely left tracking rights manually in spreadsheets or legacy contract databases, leading to undetected rights conflicts, missed royalty payments, late renewals, and litigation.
Public API documentation across the incumbent landscape is sparse, making developer-first integration into modern sales, CRM, and finance stacks difficult.
Emerging needs — transparent rights provenance for AI-training-data licensing, real-time conflict detection during negotiation, AI-assisted contract review — are not well served by the existing market.

Key Features

Rights & Avails

Structured rights catalogue per title with territory, platform, format, language, and time-window dimensions
Avails search and conflict / holdback detection across windows and exclusivities
Rights availability inquiry showing what is available, encumbered, or expired by title and territory
REST API for avails queries and rights CRUD

Contracts & Licensing Workflow

Digital contract storage with structured metadata capture (parties, term, exclusivity, financial terms)
NLP-based clause extraction from PDF contracts (royalty rates, territory definitions, exclusivity, term dates)
Licence request intake, rights availability check, deal-memo approval, and agreement execution pipeline
Obligation calendaring and renewal alerting

Royalties & Statements

Configurable royalty calculation engine: flat fee, percentage of receipts, escalating rates, co-author splits, advances, recoupment, minimum guarantees
Automated royalty statement generation (PDF + CSV) and distribution on configurable cycles
Multi-currency support with historical exchange-rate conversion
Configurable royalty rule DSL rather than hard-coded rule types

Sales Data, Revenue & Audit

Sales-data ingestion from major DSP and retail channels
Revenue tracking matched against contractual minimums and guarantees
Anomaly detection on incoming sales statements (under-reporting, missed channels)
Discrepancy flagging and full audit trail for every royalty calculation and rights change

Access, Portals & Interoperability

Role-based access for rights owners, licensees, payees, and auditors with data scoping per role
Self-service licensee / payee portal with e-signature
ONIX, DDEX, EIDR, CWR, EDItEUR import/export for industry interoperability
Optional cryptographic audit trail for rights-of-record disputes

AI-Native Advantage

AI is used to extract clauses and obligations from heterogeneous contract PDFs, auto-classify rights grants into structured dimensions, and answer natural-language avails queries such as "Can we stream Title X on TVOD in DACH after 2027-01-01?". Anomaly detection flags under-reporting and missed channels in incoming royalty statements, and rights-graph reasoning surfaces implicit conflicts including chain-of-title gaps. None of the surveyed incumbents offer NLP-based clause extraction, and AI-assisted contract review remains a documented underserved area in the market.

Tech Stack & Deployment

The platform is designed as a cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS with a self-host option. It exposes REST APIs for avails, rights, and contract management, supports SSO, and integrates with ERP and finance systems. Industry standards — DDEX, CWR, ONIX, EIDR, EDItEUR — are first-class for interoperability. An optional blockchain or cryptographic audit-trail layer is available for rights and payment provenance. The data model is intentionally vertical-agnostic so a single deployment can serve music, film, publishing, games, and sports catalogues, scaling to hundreds of thousands of titles with complex rights trees such as music sub-publishing deals.

Market Context

The candidate-projects table classifies Media Rights Management with complexity 7, low domain availability, and medium demand. The incumbent landscape is dominated by enterprise-priced, vertical-specific SaaS — Rightsline, Klopotek STREAM, Vistex Counterpoint, Mymediabox, FilmTrack, knk, and others — with pricing typically opaque and out of reach for mid-market buyers. Primary buyers are mid-tier publishers, music labels and publishers, indie film distributors, sports and brand licensors, and content groups operating across more than one vertical.

Project Status

This project is in the research and specification phase.
Contributions, feedback, and domain expertise are welcome.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from developers, domain experts, and potential users. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Important: All contributions must be your own original work or clearly attributed open-source material with a compatible licence. Copyright infringement and licence violations will not be tolerated and will result in immediate removal of the offending contribution. If you are unsure whether a piece of code, text, or other material is safe to contribute, open an issue and ask before submitting.

Licence

Licence to be determined. See discussion for context.